Cooperation in Construction: The role of values

The study presents a building project executed by a major Danish construction company, where cooperation and its staging were essential for achieving high productivity and competitiveness. The form of this cooperation is the main theme for the article. The contractor actively changed the communication and sociological values of the actors involved and saw it as essential for their way of cooperating. The cooperation included and combined elements of traditional industrial building production, with concepts and initiatives that had to be understood by means of sociological analysis. Tentatively the companies in the case can be understood as possessing a social capital which is enforced and united by initiatives of the main contractor. The social capital was built up and maintained through the actual constitution of cooperation already in the initial phase of bidding before the building process. The management logic of the main contractor is interpreted as based on a sociology-inspired understanding focusing on norms and social values rather than on contractual (law) and functional (engineering) logic, which had hitherto been prevalent in Danish construction management.